snake-plissken-1 Being a student of structural design with a burgeoning paunch, I was keen to view the contents of said title. I was more than a little dismayed by the distinct lack of instructional fitness. Though initially compelled by the sight of the protagonist's mid section, the massive divergence from an physical improvement within the plot left me wanting. I did gain an insight into the transformation of artistic endeavor into obsession and finally paranoia but quite frankly my dear, I don't give a damn. I can only hope that Russell Simmonds did not suffer the same fate as yours truly. Having said this, my expectations were perhaps slightly askew. Peter Greenaway may not hold the same principals as this tragic hero.

oOgiandujaOo_and_Eddy_Merckx It was a shock for me to discover having watched several of Peter Greenaway's films, and having loved many, that this for me, is easily his best from what I've seen. I will temper that by saying that I saw this in the cinema, and the cinema does wonders for many films. I find Greenaway's Baby of Macon, for example, has too much detail and visual complexity to be particularly accessible via home viewing. Greenaway has indeed been criticised for an overly painterly approach to detail in his films, which some deem not fit for a medium with a moving image. His long time collaborator cinematographer Sacha Vierny for example considered Prospero's Books a failure for the over-cluttering with visual detail that was cinematically indigestible.The late Sacha Vierny doesn't get talked about nearly enough, other than Belly and most of the famous Greenaway films, he shot Last Year in Marienbad for Resnais, as well as the majority of the famous pre-80s Resnais movies; The Three Crowns of the Sailor, amongst others for Ruiz; Bof Anatomie d'un Livreur for Faraldo, a marvellous though little seen film; Belle de Jour for Bunuel; La Femme Publique and others for Zulawski; as well as collaborations with Chris Marker, Maguerite Duras, and Sally Potter. The critical part he played in these great movies is rarely sung. As Vierny was not interested in fame and rarely gave interviews, how much direction he took and how much of his own artistry he plyed will forever remain an enigma. As with most of this work, The Belly of An Architect is a really great looking film.The story of this film is about an architect played by Brian Dennehy, called Stourley Kracklite, if you can believe such an indigestible name, hinting at gastric stagnancy and duodenal eructations. In consonancy with his name, he spends the movie plagued by sluggish prickly guts. Kracklite has always admired an obscure 18th century French architect called Étienne-Louis Boullée, a real-life architect who was famous more for his astonishing designs than for actual won commissions (this has often been a hazard for architects I believe). Make good use of the internet or your library and look up his magnificently insane design for Newton's tomb, which was never taken up, or his sprawling design for the Bibliothque Nationale. Due to his overreaching ambition he therefore ended up making mostly private homes, and there's only a handful of his built projects left in existence.So Kracklite has finished with making his own buildings, and spent the last ten years of his life planning an exhibition on Boullée to be held in Rome. There are a lot of typical Greenaway features here, obsession with food, cuckoldry, a battle between an older and younger man. Somehow Greenaway managed here to take his usual stuff beyond an academic game to a place where there is mythos, and poesy. Greenaway for me is a director with a deep feeling for lifecycle, he doesn't present children as small adults, or middle aged men as ephebes with jowls and paunches.For me it's a film about lifecycle and meaning, and homage to genius. I just adore it.

fedor8 One of Greenaway's most accessible movies, TBOAA has an actual story-line (unlike the unwatchable "Prospero's Books"), and we actually get to see the faces of the actors (as opposed to "The Cook, The Thief, Some Cannibalism & Plenty Of Shouting from Gambon"). We are fortunately spared Greenaway's trademark set-ups in which all the protagonists are approximately 12 miles away from the camera lens, while rhythmic, monotonous classical music accompanies their every distant move.I didn't find the movie particularly stunning visually, I have no idea what fans of this movie are talking about when they praise the sets and the photography. You can see shots like this in any National Geographic documentary about Ancient Rome or the city's museums and architecture. Greenaway occasionally sets up scenes in an effective way, certainly managing to get the maximum out of the rather thin plot, but there is little here that deserves utterances of "wow!". Let's not get over-excited here, people, just because the movie was made by a man who is considered avant-garde and whom it is hence forbidden to criticize too much (an unwritten rule in the hypothetical "Movie Buff's Guide Of Pretentious European Movies").This is close to a 2-hour movie, and yet very little unfolds. Dennehy predictably gets cheated by his ugly wife, gets ill, has a brief and predictable fling with the sister of the guy who is screwing his wife, and then kills himself at the end. His death coincides with the birth of his child, and we see Boulee's year of death right above his dead body. Frankly, that kind of "symbolism" never gets me too excited. Dennehy's obsession with bellies and Boulee may hold some mysterious grip on Greenaway, and maybe some of his more rabid followers as well, but it doesn't exactly offer anything of significance or even "depth". Tossing historical, architectural, and art references left and right does not a great movie make. Again, I can get all that information on the internet, by watching a documentary, or reading. Not that I was annoyed by that, but it boggles the mind why some film fans wet their pants over this kind of thing.It was predictable that at least one of the main three characters would die at the end. I was even a bit surprised that there wasn't more tragedy happening, with perhaps a scuffle, knives stabbing bellies, people losing their noses, heads rolling into bins... Greenaway never shied away from bombastic conclusions. Suicide, rape, or murder, how else could the movie end? Greenaway was fortunate to have had someone like Dennehy, because quite frankly the rest of the cast was miserably uninteresting and flat.This brings me to my main criticism. Dennehy comes to Italy - not Mars - and yet the behaviour that he encounters is that of a bunch of very rude, stone-faced, evil Romans that seem to have been shipped straight from planet Greenaway to our little Earth. Whether the director has something concrete against the Italian people, or whether he was just being typically "weird" in the worst European-cinema tradition, I don't know. The interaction between the American guest and the Italians is usually illogical, sometimes strange, and often just plain silly. An example of the latter would be the way Dennehy punches some brash young Italians on two occasions. If you wanna be "weeeeeird", then be weird all the way, instead of creating a movie that remains undecided whether it wants to be realistic or all-out experimental.

Paul Starring Brian Dennehy, an unusual actor for a Peter Greenaway film, as Kracklite, an architect, a career we don't often see explored in cinema, Greenaway's 'Belly of an Architect' is somehow bigger and more emotionally ambitious than most of his other works, which lack human resonance. In his other films, the characters are uniformly British and so Greenaway's coldness and archness toward them is indicative of a general misanthropy. Here, it's aimed squarely at Romans, whose loose morals and carnivorous practices contrast with the enormity of Kracklite's ego and generosity of spirit. His stomach is being eaten away by some unknown illness or cancer, and this serves as a metaphor for his ego being eaten away by the carnivorousness of Roman culture. His wife, his identity (which is a vicarious one, given his devotion/debt to his idol, Bouleé) and his work are being repossessed by the conquestful Roman carnivores who aim to destroy him simply for the material gain of taking what is so ostentatiously his. But his devotion to Bouleé, his need to make Bouleé's work more widely known, is not a singular or altruistic act; the exhibition he is organizing will make Bouleé more commercial and accessible, but it will also be an addendum to his own career, a manifestation of his ego. His diary is written in the form of letters to Bouleé, to whom he is almost praying as his own personal God. And his devotion to this God is not a selfless one, since Bouleé is so inexorably an element of his own identity.Rome and its buildings are given a golden, postmodern glow, their clarity enhanced by Wim Mertens' musical score, which adds its own sunlight to the proceedings. But the sunlight that glows throughout Rome and permeates the aura of the film is an impersonal one, an indifferent one, as ancient as the ruins of Rome, which our Roman characters observe have been more useful and influential as ruins than they were prior. "They're better as ruines," a character observes. "Your imagination compensates for what you don't see, like a woman with clothes on." The Romans are depicted here as carnivores (and the word "carnivore" is used multiple times) who not only want to devour and repossess, but want to strip. Brian Dennehy's performance here is indeed stripped, larger than life, fiery. He explodes on screen, bringing the film into another realm, introducing emotional dimensions not often seen in the films of Greenaway; and in this, the film has a power that inhabits the movie's symmetrical form (mostly every shot is symmetrical), its architecture, and threatens to destroy it. The coldness that is typical of Greenaway, that architecturized godlessness, is at war with fiery human passion in all its flawed nakedness.Greenaway's movies, in their arctic wit and obsession with symmetry, are cinema as architecture more so than storytelling, so 'The Belly of an Architect,' contrary to the claim by many that it's his most mainstream and therefore weakest work, is perhaps his most appropriate film, and maybe his best